Civil rights groups:
· Civil rights groups such as the NAACP, the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) led the non-violent fight against segregation in the South.
· Blacks began to conduct sit-ins at white lunch counters throughout the South, refusing to leave until they were served.
· CORE organized Freedom Rides in which people rode buses from town to town trying to integrate bus terminals.
· The protesters continued their policy of civil disobedience even though they were frequently attacked and dogs, fire hoses, and electric cattle prods were used to break up their protests.
March on Washington:
· In 1963, over 200,000 Americans marched on Washington, D.C. in a civil rights demonstration.
· Martin Luther King, Jr. gave his now-famous speech in which he proclaimed, “When we let freedom ring, when we let it ring from every village and every hamlet, from every state and every city, we will be able to speed up that day when all of God’s children, black men and white men, Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics, will be able to join hands and sing in the words of the old Negro spiritual, ‘Free at last! Free at last! Thank God Almighty, we are free at last!”
Civil Rights Laws:
· The Civil Rights Act of 1964 did the following:
- protected the rights of all citizens to vote
- outlawed segregation in hiring and in all public places
· The Twenty-fourth Amendment was ratified in 1965, which banned poll taxes.
· The Voting Rights Act of 1965 ended literacy tests and ensured that all voters were able to register to vote.
